Writing Great Fiction

Lecture 22: Revision without Tears

o If you write a whole draft without looking back and don’t start

revising until it’s done, then you’ve got all the revision to do

all at once. This may make facing the revision more daunting

because you’re looking at rewriting days or months of previous

work. Still, forging ahead without having to worry every day

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draft easier.

o If you rewrite each individual section before you proceed to

the next one, you’ll be revising as you go. This approach may

make the revision a little less daunting, but it’s no guarantee

that when you’ve reached the end, you still won’t have to go

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this method, you still reach a point where you have to think

about everything at once—whether the narrative works as a

whole and whether all the individual parts work.

Case Study: Revision

z 7KH/HFWXUHU¶V7DOH is the story of Nelson Humboldt, a failing academic

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Narrative

Chapter

Scene

Prose

When revising, you need to think about every level of your work, from the

narrative as a whole to individual chapters, scenes, and sentences.